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LIFE & LEISURE
| 46 | ISSUE 579 DEC-JAN 2015-16
Poor kale. For the past couple of years
it’s been the star of the vegetable
family. Appearing in so many dishes
and promoted as a super food. The
adulation was immense, but like so
many superfoods before it, kale has
been pushed off its pedestal. How did
this happen?
A health-coaching clinician in the
United States noticed some of his
clients were experiencing health
issues despite an apparently healthy
diet and lots of green smoothies. For
the uninitiated, a green smoothie is
created by shoving lots of raw greens
into a blender, sometimes fruit, too,
and water, then mixing until liquefied.
The result can vary from a downright
delicious and healthy pale green,
fruity concoction to a dark-green,
funky-looking sludge. You can ingest
a huge amount of greens in a green
smoothie, and certainly far more
greens than you could comfortably
ingest with a knife and fork.
Words by Olwen Anderson
Olwen Anderson explains how the latest
super food, kale, fell from grace and how our
tendency to overdo some healthy foods can
lead to more problems.
Can you get too much
of a good thing?
Some greens don’t want to
be consumed
Greens are good for us (something you’ve
probably been hearing since childhood),
but there’s a problem with eating too
much of some varieties in their raw
state. It’s all about the plant’s protection,
which it built up over millennia. Many
varieties have developed ways to deter
potential diners like insects, birds and
animals. They generated bitter tastes,
phytates and many other natural plant
chemicals to make their leaves and
fruits taste bitter or be poisonous.
Although the greens we currently
grow for consumption are mild
compared to their ancestors, they still
contain some natural chemicals. Some
of these are known as ‘anti-nutrients’,
because their presence interferes with
the uptake of minerals from our food.
Inside your body, these natural plant
chemicals can bind with minerals we
need so that they can’t be absorbed
and instead follow the path of other
food waste out of your body. You lose
the minerals, and this may be what
was happening with the clients of that
health coach: over-consuming greens.
Mother Nature used to help us avoid
over-consumption of particular foods by
arranging for different vegetables to be
available only within different seasons.
You couldn’t over-consume kale, for
example, because it wouldn’t be in
season all year round. In our modern
times, however, you could conceivably
eat kale all year round, because it would
be shipped in from faraway places or
grown in a greenhouse.
Be health-advice savvy
Turns out the clients of that health
coach were overdoing the kale,
particularly through green smoothies,
and their bodies were suffering from
it. The problem wasn’t the kale (it’s
still important to eat your greens), but
it was too much of one vegetable for
too long.
There’s another element to this
story (or any story about super foods,
‘dangerous’ foods and the like) that
is worthwhile considering when you
evaluate health advice: “Who will
benefit from this information?” In the
case of the American health coach and